Super-Giant Black Hole Baffles Scientists

You would probably not enjoy the galaxy NGC 1277. Never mind that it's far - 220 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus. The problem is that at its center is a giant, giant black hole, 17 billion times as massive as our sun, so big that scientists calculate it makes up 59 percent of the mass of the galaxy's disc.

Astrophysicists have long believed that there's a black hole at the center of our Milky Way, but it probably accounts for something like 0.1 percent of the galaxy's center. The one in NGC 1277, scientists report in today's edition of the journal Nature, is the second largest they've ever observed, and it upends what they thought about how galaxies form.

Black holes, as you'll recall, are objects in space so massive that their gravity consumes everything around them - stars, planets, matter, energy, even light. Earthly scientists can only observe their effect on the space around them, not see them directly. Be grateful we're not close to one. They're actually useful to astrophysicists in explaining the nice spiral shape of many galaxies - you need something massive in the middle for the stars to circle - but NGC 1277 is an extreme.

"This is a really oddball galaxy," said Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the team that made the find. "It's almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems." Gebhardt and colleagues at the McDonald Observatory have been calculating the mass of different black holes - no small task considering their powerful gravity.

I have a friend that recently got a job at UT's McDonald Observatory. That is where I heard about this from.

17 billion solar masses is unfathomably large. It takes light 8 minutes to reach the Earth from the Sun. That is 93 million miles traveled in 8 minutes.

Neptune is 30 times further from the Sun. (2,780,246,913 miles) It takes light from the Sun 4.12 hours to reach Neptune. Neptune's orbit is twice that. (60 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth, or well over 5 billion miles)

NGC-1277 is 11 times wider than Neptune's orbit. That comes to about 61,165,432,086 miles. (61.1 billion miles wide) The size of NGC-1277 dwarfs our entire solar system. It is 11 times larger!

Traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 4 days to cross the diameter of this black hole.

I have a friend that recently got a job at UT's McDonald Observatory. That is where I heard about this from.

17 billion solar masses is unfathomably large. It takes light 8 minutes to reach the Earth from the Sun. That is 93 million miles traveled in 8 minutes.

Neptune is 30 times further from the Sun. (2,780,246,913 miles) It takes light from the Sun 4.12 hours to reach Neptune. Neptune's orbit is twice that. (60 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth, or well over 5 billion miles)

NGC-1277 is 11 times wider than Neptune's orbit. That comes to about 61,165,432,086 miles. (61.1 billion miles wide) The size of NGC-1277 dwarfs our entire solar system. It is 11 times larger!

Traveling at the speed of light, it would take you 4 days to cross the diameter of this black hole.

So how big did you think the universe was, if not infinite? Some big infinite brick wall at the edge?

Most scientists agree that the universe is ever expanding, so that would, in fact, mean that the universe is expanding into something. In short, a lot think the universe is finite at any point in time but will never stay finite, if that makes sense.

The universe is estimated to be 15 billion years. That 220 million is almost 1.5% of that.

Those are two totally different measurements. The universe is almost 15 billion years old, but that has no relation in going a certain distance in light years/speed.

One is a measurement of how fast something is traveling, the other is just a measure of time.

Assuming the universe is expanding slower than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), I was saying if a spaceship traveled at that speed for 220 million years in time, that it would eventually catch the 'edge' of the universe (if there is or isn't one).

Never-mind, too hard to express my thoughts, no way to explain what I am trying to say in words here